Calculate, Convert, Re-Caclulate With The New PCalc.

We all have our favorite utilities for the Mac, right? Some are simple, and handy, and inexpensive. Others are superb, essential, well crafted. That’s what you get with PCalc 3.

Isn’t PCalc just another calculator? Sure. Mac OS X is just another flavor of Unix. We’re not Mac users because we love Unix.

We’re Mac users because we want to make good choices about our computer needs and requirements and the Mac, with a boatload of excellent utilities, does just that.

So do some of the utilities. PCalc is in that league. Why? PCalc comes from James Thomson, the developer of DragThing, one of the best utilities ever developed for the Mac.

That alone makes me sit up and take notice about the recent release of PCalc. Yes, PCalc’s been around since the Mac Classic days, now updated and ready for Tiger.

If you like quality utilities that do more than you expect, you’ll be pleasantly surprised with PCalc. This is not your father’s calculator.

I use the calculator in Mac OS X. It’s handy. There’s a Widget version. It’s free. It works. What more could you want?

How about conversions, unit conversions, lots of conversions. All the conversions you can’t get in the OS X calculator, you’ll probably find in PCalc.

My wife is the calculator wizard and she’s not pleased with the OS X calculator but has fallen in love with PCalc. I’m not swooning. She is.

PCalc has editable keyboard shortcuts for every action, all actions, all functions, and all unit conversions. That alone makes it worth $19. They keypad wizards love this stuff.

Me? I love undo. PCalc must love me because it includes multiple undo and redo. I need it.

As you’d expect with any decent calculator these days, PCalc comes with an enhanced RPN mode, built-in software update, and a whole slew of new conversion mechanisms.

Some, I’d never even heard of before and I collect Mac calculators (for the wife).

18 trignometric functions. 13 complext number functions. Financial and special functions, and editable constants. You have to think about that for a moment. Editable? Constants?

Decimal, Hex, Octal, Binary. All at your math wizardry fingertips. In fact, I found I could change the Speed of Light to whatever I wanted. I’m working on the exact calculation to be able to go back in time. I’ll keep you posted.

Oh, if you find that gravity has changed, it’s probably me monkeying around with some setting on PCalc.

Why didn’t things like PCalc exist when I was in school? Yes, I remember using (that’s stretching the term ‘use’ quite a bit) a slide rule. Yep. Just like the folks on Apollo 13.

Amazingly, James has included a Preferences selection that actually has preferences. You can change the background color of the screen readout, the number color, and the number decimal places. All the way to 14.

The ‘full sized’ calculator in my briefcase goes to 8.

The real fun begins in the Preferences > Shortcuts. Woo hoo! My wife thought she’d died and gone to Mac Calculator Heaven.

So, calculate on this for a moment. The developer of one the Mac’s best ever utility applications, DragThing, updates a calculator for Mac OS X. Not only does it do every calculation I know of, those my wife knows of, and potentially alter the speed of light and time travel (I’m still trying to figure that out), but it does skins.

Metal. Aqua. Basic Mac look. If I were into numbers I’d be palpitating right now. Wait. I am. I think I figured out how to go back in time… now Bill Gates is in big trouble.

Click Here for all the nifty neato details, then download and the upgrade. PCalc only runs on Tiger 10.4.2. There’s an upgrade for PCalc 2 users, and an upgrade price for PCalc 2.2.3 version that was included with a Mac.